Standard MySQL faster than Percona and Maria on my rig

One thing I have noticed with MySQL alternatives is that they are stated to be faster than MySQL for large database / high volume usage.

That's great and certainly useful for a lot of sites. My site, however, I am actually seeing worse performance with Percona and MariaDB.

The site has low traffic, includes a forum but the main use is for displaying stats from the database. In one particular report the time taken from generating to completing in the browser window is as follows:

MySQL 5.8sec
Percona 6.2sec
MariaDB 6.5sec

All are using the same my.cnf file, so I wonder if I need to do any further tweaking to see better performance with Percona or MariaDB?

Comment

1. Percona has no optimization for the memory engine
2. Percona provides you with better monitoring statistics, more configuration parameters and is better for high concurrency
3. Have you used the same MySQL version number (major/minor)?
4. Try to run your queries directly against aw_races, and make sure that the // from MEM_aw_races where // can be satisfied by an index.
5. If you try 4. and aw_races is not InnoDB, convert it and optimize your my.cnf for InnoDB ( http://tools.percona.com/ ) or your forum will be unavailable while you run these stats queries

Comment

4. You may read from disk for copying the data to MEM_aw_races. So if the data is not cached, both our approaches have to read from disk. With your approach, all data is in memory three times: the cached version after reading MEM_aw_races, the memory table, and the temp table created for executing the stats query. So, if you are short on memory, your approach will definitely use the last bit of memory.

Comment

I don't think there will be an issue with memory for this rig. There is plenty spare.

The inserting to MEM table is only done once each day. The temporary MEM tables can be anything from a few K to 100M. Once they have been processed they are dropped immediately and the memory returns. The only issue with that last one is that the opened tables figure keeps on growing and growing, which then throws out the table cache stat e.g.